Water Segmentation Based on Morphologic and Edge-enhanced U-Net Using Sentinel-1 SAR Images

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is considered to be suitable for near real-time inundation monitoring. The distinctly different intensity between water and land makes it adequate for waterbody detection, but the intrinsic speckle noise and variable intensity of SAR images decrease the accuracy of waterbody detection. In this study, we suggest two modules, named 'morphology module' and 'edgeenhanced module', which are the combinations of pooling layers and convolutional layers, improving the accuracy of waterbody detection. The morphology module is composed of min-pooling layers and max-pooling layers, which shows the effect of morphological transformation. The edge-enhanced module is composed of convolution layers, which has the fixed weights of the traditional edge detection algorithm. After comparing the accuracy of various versions of each module for U-Net, we found that the optimal combination is the case that the morphology module of min-pooling and successive layers of min-pooling and max-pooling, and the edge-enhanced module of Scharr filter were the inputs of conv9. This morphologic and edge-enhanced U-Net improved the F1-score by 9.81% than the original U-Net. Qualitative inspection showed that our model has capability of detecting small-sized waterbody and detailed edge of water, which are the distinct advancement of the model presented in this research, compared to the original U-Net.